The Playbook for Tomorrow’s Leaders
Health | Innovation | Society
Hey Reader,
Update: The city still burns and business, families, children, and animals are still displaced. Please consider donating to the LA Fire victims. Here is a list of worthy charities.
Talent congregates in space and time. If you wanted to be an artist, few better places in the 14 century than Florence. If you wanted to be a philosopher, then Ancient Greece was the place to be. The same is true for us today.
Today there are 4 Corners of American Culture : New York/DC, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Florida.
Each city epitomizes a unique worldview, media ecosystem, and has monetized a unique form of power. These are the poles of a new American order in a continual battle for attention, capital, and talent.
Any major business, social trend, or political development likely involves one or more of these centers. It is because while politics can shape culture, culture now drives all politics.
The real divisions in American are not merely right v. left, but which of these paradigms wins the future.
Power is power and everyone wants it.
Los Angeles is obviously closest to my heart. Historically, Los Angeles and by extension, Hollywood, has been America’s greatest cultural export.
It is because Los Angeles, and the larger cultural norms of American, is charismatic. The best storytellers in the world buss tables here, want to train at USC film school, and act under the bright lights of the Warner Brothers sound stage. Young adults in Hyderabad grew up expecting arranged marriages but binge on our rom-com’s. Kids in France grow up wearing Jordan’s.
All pop culture is either American or “foreign” – which is incredibly culturally narcissistic – but is a representation of LA cultural dominance today. Even when international stars make, they make it here. Squid Game was an entirely Korean phenomenon but it was California’s Netflix that was the Kingmaker.
The West’s magnetic near magnetic cultural attraction that has colonized the world with our heroes, entertainment and fashion – and the underlying cultural values they represent – is a modern incarnation of the Anglo-American imperium.
LA has been all things arts, drama, and style – aka “what is cool.” In fact, that storied legacy is why a friend of mine feels that despite the LA fires and concerns over Hollywood’s demise – the city’s entertainment infrastructure will be rebuilt.
Over drinks he told me that you can’t replicate strumming a guitar in the same studio that has housed Pink Floyd or Bob Marley. People from Kanye to Paul McCartney still travel to Rick Rubin’s beach side studio near Malibu to create new jams. Creativity has an ineffable ethos that can’t be recreated simply by making a studio or soundstage elsewhere.
LA is the city of dreams for a reason.
It may also be why so many people have a love/hate relationship with it:
If LA is the city of dreams, then Silicon Valley is the city of the future. Despite the popularity of new places like Austin, if you want to start a business ( especially in tech), SV is still the place. There’s a reason Patagonia fleece wearing VC’s stroll the Stanford campus looking for the next undergrad wunderkind with a new idea.
As been noted previously, in a 6 mile radius of downtown San Jose, more wealth has been created in the last 50 years than near any other time and place in the modern era.
What we see now is startups, classically represented by Apple starting in Steve Job’s garage, now becoming the predominant form of New Power. They have market capitalizations orders of magnitude greater their nearest non tech rivals. They also have something even more valuable: our data. They know how we buy, bank, and date.
Not content with that, they seek to buy LA and DC. Just look at this line up from Trump’s inauguration in this “trillion dollar ” photo:
Companies have long realized that while you can disrupt businesses, you have to buy the government. The New Power is starting to realize it and they are catching up. As Ezra Klein of the NYT pointed out, it’s telling that manufacturing CEO’s were not present at the inauguration despite his campaigning of bringing blue collar jobs back. These are CEOs seeking to control our attention. And it comes at a time when Trump has launched his own crypto meme coin, which has soared in valuation
NYC and DC could arguably be separated out, but then I don’t have a clever pitch to sell to you. NYC and DC represent traditional forms of established power, Old Money and Old Politics. Aka they are the liberal establishment.
They are academics or the skilled professionals who populate LinkedIn. They find the New Yorker cartoons funny. They put a premium on prestige and bourgeois cultural values. In fact, David Brooks of the New York Times refer to them as “Bobos” – Bourgeise Bohemians. These are career oriented, coastal, upper middle class white collar elites that focus on wellness, quiet luxury and have progressive views.
Through their cultural imprint, they have created the rules of what can and cannot be said in a room. It is why DEI efforts, gender pronoun declarations in email signatures, and concepts such as “micro aggressions” and “conscious uncoupling” have gone mainstream.
In matters of business and finance, they tend to be risk averse. In fact, Famed statistician and pollster Nate Silver would refer to many of these as the Village: risk averse, who lean center-left, and believe in discourse. This core disposition is why fundamentally cannot grasp a MAGA narrative that is risk seeking and not just risk tolerant, lean (heavily) right, and believe in real politik as opposed to soft power. Think of people who invest in ETFs versus those who buy meme coins.
Florida represents the new if uneasy fusion of traditional Evangelicalism with the counter opposite of the Village – the River. These are libertarian BitCoin fanatics, Tech Titans and poker players. It’s no accident that Miami’s savvy mayor Francis Suarez has positioned the city as the home of crypto. They are gamblers at heart. They have no problem risking everything – including our economy (2008 anyone?) and our democracy (Jan 6th anyone?) – to burn it all down in the name of a big win. But that swashbuckling demeanor has also brought enormous innovation and wealth so they are naturally aligned with Silicon Valley.
To serve them has been a media ecosystem – the New Media – driven by their patron saints Joe Rogan (top ranking podcast) and Elon Musk (Twitter/X).
The religious fundamentalism and American jingoism underlying this movement puts it at direct confrontation with the progressive and multi-cultural ethic of the LA and NYC/DC. It is here where our most vicious culture flashpoints are taking place.
For better or worse, Trump is the most consequential American politics since Ronald Reagan. And what he has done is entirely shift the narrative of all policy debates. It is not about big government v small government. It is about who’s in and who’s out. Who is a real American? Who counts?
Trump has weaponized a long simmering sentiment of deep grievance, and thereby made the political cultural.
What’s the key commonality in all of these 4 groups? Winners.
Americans love winner.
America sees itself as the ultimate winner among nations.
You can get away with almost anything in America if you win. Once you lose, then the injunctions and indictments and incriminations start. This has long been the case, but the return of Trump to office solidifies a gladiator mentality to our way of life. It’s not only winner take all in our politics, culture and economy. You must punish the losers.
I truly believe America is the land of opportunity.
But it is also the land of catastrophe.
And rising of SV and Florida means leaning in more towards this ethos.
This is also why each of the 4 Corners of American culture pontificates about why it’s the winner:
- LA (Entertainment) – We are the “in crowd.” Even the super wealthy want to have fun, be cool, and experience the glamour of our parties. They want to belong. Our entertainment driven, consumptive society has only increased the need the stories only we can make.
- SV (Tech) – “Software is eating the world.” And who owns the software? Us. Technology is always a one way arrow and we control tech. Watch out.
- DC/NYC (the Establishment) – Any business will have to go through our financing and regulatory mechanisms. We agenda set. Plus, our cultural tastes shape Hollywood and is the bastion of mainstream America. We are still the gatekeepers.
- Florida (Tradition) – The mythos of a Judeo Christian America, built by salt of the earth cowboys, still holds strong (Yellowstone anyone?). Conservative culture, supercharged by podcasts and Bitcoin, means “America First.” Trump is our savior and we will undo the sexual revolution ruining America since the 1960’s and return our priorities to our own country. You can prosper with us – if you play ball and are the right kind of American. If not, you best be careful.
These are not siloed areas. As much as each camp may argue for its own ascendancy and power, they need each other. As they say, politics makes strange bedfellows.
It’s a game of mix and match and more value is created through addition (or M&A’s) then subtraction.
- SV + LA –> Apple, Netflix
- Fla + SV –> Bitcoin
- DC + SV –> Trump/Musk merger
- Fla + LA –> NewsNation, Conservative Hollywood
The list goes on. It’s an interesting experiment to breakdown companies and politics from this standpoint.
It also creates unique sub cultures:
- If you’re under 35 male – you are trading on Robinhood, Fanduel and Coinbase (Tech + Finance, Tech + Sports ).
- Over 30 year health conscious mamas buy from GOOP and are sympathetic to RFK (LA +DC+FLa)
- Gen Z, especially girls, watch and content create for Tiktok and hate government over-reach on this matter. No surprise that Trump, erroneously thinking he won the youth vote, put a stay on the TikTok ban.
From a business standpoint, you need to leverage this to your advantage. Which community already exists to support your venture? Which combination of cities best describe the demographic and psychographics of your core customer base?
One reason I advise startups to build in public is to help sort out the answers to these core strategic questions.
A final warning.
Historically, the left has centralized cultural power while the right has centralized economic power. Those lines are now shifting in the Trump era.
The Framer’s knew that centralized power was a threat to democracy and source of corruption. They wisely put in checks and balances in the American experiment. What they perhaps did not recognize is that people, even when empowered in a democracy, would willingly want centralized authority often to an extreme degree.
Why?
Because the enormous rise of entertainment, convenience and technology we’ve been given as a result. We trade it all for the ability to watch whatever we want, order food with a press of a button, and have Amazon order and ship anything often with a day – as standup Ronny Chieng hilariously point out. We have the power of kings and we treat is an expectation. We happily trade privacy for the services of VC fueled companies like Uber, Hinge, and TikTok .
George Orwell is rolling over in his grave.
Regardless of your views on his politics or frailty, Biden’s final message before leaving was prescient in his description of an emerging Oligarchy in this country. Silicon Valley is in bed with DC, fueled by money in NYC, all in lip service to the conceits of Florida and using Los Angeles as a political foil to agitate the masses.
They have mastered the Four Corners of American Culture for their own agenda.
It’s time you do the same.
Tomorrow Can’t Wait,
